Recent developments in intelligent construction for dams and underground works

Harnessing artificial intelligence (AI) to improve productivity has significant strategic value for achieving high quality construction in hydraulic engineering. In response to the urgent demand for intelligent construction of hydraulic structures such as dams and underground cavern clusters, this paper proposes a closed-loop operational framework encompassing multi-source heterogeneous information sensing and fusion, autonomous analysis and decision-making, and adaptive feedback control throughout the entire construction process. An extensive literature review charts China’s progress in this field. The authors present examples of some applications of intelligent construction for many aspects of dam engineering and underground works.